Stuck in our cars on the highway to hell

CLIMATE change, peak oil, mounting traffic congestion and
planning inertia have given Melbourne a transport headache. For
half a century, we have hitched our hopes to an impossible dream
 the dream of automobility. The freedom to drive when, where
and as often as we like has become almost a sacred right. Now our
dream has become a nightmare. As petrol prices rise and the
environmental costs of maintaining a car-based city hit home, we
may wonder how we got ourselves into this jam. And whether we can
get out of it.

Australians have always been in love with mobility. A century
ago, steam trains and cable trams helped to make Melbourne one of
the most suburbanised cities in the world. We were even more likely
to travel to work by train or tram than Londoners or New
Yorkers.

The city might have continued to develop along these lines. In
the early 1920s, rail and tramway officials planned to double the
network, electrify the system and encircle the CBD with an
underground rail loop. But these plans were stillborn. The Great
Depression and the Second World War curbed public transport
investment. In the late 1940s, patronage on Melbourne's
over-strained public transport reached an all-time high. But the
city of strap-hangers was growing tired of public transport.

In 1948, Labor PM Ben Chifley greeted the first Holden,
Australia's Own Car, as it rolled off the assembly line at
Fishermen's Bend. A year later, Liberal leader Robert Menzies won
power with the promise of finally ending wartime petrol rationing.
Melbourne had glimpsed a different future, a future based on the
car.

To its admirers, the car was a freedom machine. It symbolised
the self-directed, mobile, status-conscious society emerging in the
suburbs. Cars promised to liberate people from the tyranny of the
timetable, and the crush and sweat of the crowd.

In those days, Labor championed public transport. Six of premier
John Cain snr's cabinet were former transport unionists. Socialists
believed there was something egalitarian and fraternal in a form of
transport shared by the people as well as owned by them. A little
of that ideal lingers in the outlook of present-day public
transport advocates.

Melbourne embraced the car with astonishing speed. In 1951, only
one Melburnian in 10 drove to work, but by 1974 two-thirds did so.
In the late 1960s, the Bolte government hatched the Melbourne
Transportation Plan, a blueprint that guided the city's transport
development for the following three decades. It included only one
major public transport project, the long-delayed underground rail
loop. Its centrepiece was a 500-kilometre network of freeways
extending along the Yarra and its tributaries, and criss-crossing
the inner city from north to south.

Protests by inner-city activists killed off most of the
north-south connections, leaving the radial connections along the
creek and river valleys, such as the Monash and Eastern freeways.
The outcome made political sense but left a truncated system that
duplicated the radial pattern of the existing CBD-centred public
transport system while doing little to accommodate the rapidly
growing volume of cross-city movement.

The big transport projects of the Kennett era, such as Citylink,
reinforced this pattern. Labor has improved rolling stock and
tinkered with the ticketing system but has done little to extend
public transport to the suburbs that lacked it. The further the
metropolis has extended, the vaster have become the wedges of
car-dependent suburbs between the thin ribbons of rail and
tram.

Melbourne is now so dependent on the car that there may seem to
be no way out. Yet if it took only 20 years for us to get hooked on
the car, perhaps it's not too short a time to cure our addiction.
Two fallacies bedevil thinking about our transport future. One is
the belief that automobility, like the free market, is an
irresistible force  that we must simply keep driving and hope
that someone soon comes up with a petrol-less car.

Given the choice, most Melburnians would probably vote for an
automobilised future. It's what our mobile society seems to
require. Automobility, however, is not an end in itself, just one
good among many. Not everything about it may even be good. In
promoting individual freedom, for example, it may erode community
ties.

The other fallacy is the nostalgic belief that the future lies
in a return to the past. But the shortest distance between the
present and a desirable future seldom detours through the past. The
costs of retro-fitting a 21st century city with a 1920s-style fixed
rail public transport system is likely to be prohibitive.

Too much recent debate has centred on big-ticket solutions to
ease congestion in the inner city, through road tunnels or
underground railways; too little on developing lower-cost public
transport solutions for the car-dependent outer suburbs. It's no
longer good enough to release new residential land without a
transport plan. And it's time someone looked again at our ossified
suburban bus system. After all, it's in the outer suburbs that the
poorest people now live and, as Ross Garnaut observed last week,
that's where the high cost of our addiction to automobility is
likely to be felt most acutely.

Graeme Davison is the author of Car Wars: How the Car Won
our Hearts and Conquered our Cities, published by Allen and
Unwin.

1206207485703-theage.com.auhttp://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/stuck-in-our-cars-on-the-highway-to-hell/2008/03/29/1206207485703.htmltheage.com.auThe Age2008-03-30Stuck in our cars on the highway to hellGraeme DavisonOpinion